Participant recruitment in an online world: using blog comments and forum posts.

Abstract:

The recruitment of participants to online research can be difficult when they must meet restrictive requirements, a situation we faced in recruiting the parents of 2-month-olds. Here we describe a new method, blog commenting, and compare it to the more common online technique of posting recruitment information on parent-oriented online forums. In the blog method, we searched blogs for infant-specific terms and phrases; we then read entries from those retrieved blogs and identified ones written by a parent of an appropriately aged infant. We then posted to the blog a comment in which we invited the parent to participate and to visit our research web site. Rates of study completion and most participant characteristics did not differ for blog- and forum-recruited participants. We discuss the particular strengths and weaknesses of blog recruiting and conclude that it is well suited for topics that people care to write about.